After that time, I told Dad. I think it was the next day, at supper. “Derek’s trying to have sex with me.” Dad did look properly shocked, to be fair. Not the sort of shocked that people do when they want you to know they’re shocked. He did the expressionless, pale version that people do when they’ve evacuated their faces and moved inside to handle the horror of what they’re being confronted with. I’ve since seen it on the faces of people seeing someone starving for the first time.
I filled the silence. “He touches me. He’s started to make me touch him.” It sounded like a voice coming from elsewhere, like I was possessed. Now I’d said it, it was real for the first time and I wanted to cry. We ate a little more. Spam and beetroot, I think.
Eventually he said, “I’ll sort it out immediately. I’m sure it’s nothing.”
Those were his exact words. I thought he might hug me, but he didn’t. Perhaps he thought I’d think that was the same thing. And he didn’t sort it out. I was back in the shed the following week. I know now that those few days changed me and Dad for ever. I never went to the cinema with him again anyway, always busy when he suggested it. Perhaps he thought I was growing up, but it was an odd way to grow up. I think I hated him for putting me back in that shed. And, in the end, I sorted it out myself, almost as if that was what Dad had meant for me to do.
Derek seemed bolder. It seemed as if carpentry had become an excuse to get to the shed and that we’d both signed up to that understanding. As soon as we got there, he was rubbing himself against me from behind. He turned me and took off the glove of my left hand this time, wrapping my stiff little fingers around his engorged tool.
I could see where this was going. We were going to have sex and I didn’t want it to start that way and I knew I was going to have to make a radical intervention, a game changer, as it were.
As I understand it now, of course, he was going to rape me, but that wasn’t a legal distinction that bothered me at the time. He was panting, his eyes closed, thrusting urgently. I was looking around, as if distracting myself, like some child prostitute trying to displace herself. His left hand was steadying himself on the bench, gripping the base unit of a round saw that fell across a kind of safety guillotine, his long, crinkled fingers across the locating groove in cast iron, bolted to the bench. There was usually a little safety grille around it, but he’d removed it for easier access. The round saw unit was hinged and of great weight, so that it didn’t move easily and could be guided into wood without splintering the grain.
Nothing was planned. I just saw the simplest logic of cause and effect and there’s a beauty in that.
So I reached out with my right, available hand, pulled hard on the handle and the round saw block swung a quarter arc, gathered a blind and irresistible momentum under its own weight and fell with a metallic clunk, not visceral at all, across the middle and forefinger of Derek’s fist. He exploded away from me and doubled up. Then came his cry, a deep, primal howl, and he fell past me at waist height, through the door and rolled on to the grass of his lawn. The wooden door flapped anxiously as I watched him, caught between holding his injured hand and fumbling defensively with his trouser flies.
In that moment, I could see everything perfectly. The clarity was overwhelming and peaceful. Derek would talk of an accident. My father would know the truth from my cold calmness, but he would never speak of it and it would be an impassable barrier between us until he was dead. And I was free.
I looked at the round saw. I heard later that his forefinger, which had lain where the curve of the saw left the block, was still attached by some sinew and stitched back on and saved. But his middle finger, the one that had dipped between my thighs in the car, lay there on the bench, turned on its back, lifeless. It looked, of course, like a little willy.
*
I learned a lot at Aldgate that warm summer’s day in early July. I learned that the paramedics who are first at the scene of a bomb explosion have a code system for the mortally injured. G1 for those with the best chance of survival who are to be removed immediately. G2 for those who have to be treated on-site before they can be moved. And G3 for those who aren’t going to make it. They’re filled with morphine and left to die while others are prioritised. G4 are dead already.
When we got back from looting the mini-mart, we started to distribute to the crew that had completed the first rescue shift. I wasn’t surprised that they were hungry – I’ve never had any trouble eating when
